Some thoughts of a Machine Learning Practitioner on Software Development, Management, Team Building, Startups, Python, Agile Development, Data visualization... that will distract you from your end goals by making you less efficient but are critical to manage in order to succeed.
Don't forget that long time adaptation to inefficient approaches can become your enemy. Let's try to empower others by sharing knowledge & personal experiences.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Montreal Python 6 demo packaging and UI major improvements are the results of a peer programming with apt-get install ygingras. In this world where time is the biggest constraint, I could not finalized some of the demo improvements and packaging without help. bitbucket, the mercurial host projects has been very useful to store demo parts (i.e.: flayers, mlboost and digipy). I am not working often off-line, but been able to commit in the plane or in the bus, exchange dundles and create branches easily has very useful.You can play with the demo, just type:

easy_install digipy (on your favorite linux distribution)

Simply type digipy and tab to see all digipy programs used in the live demo (i..e: use --help to get more details). I have been impress by the powerful setup.py related distutil tools of python to create packages (sdist, register, upload to push code on the Python Package Index is just GREAT!)Virtual Environment, a tool to create isolated Python environments, of Ian Biking has been really usefull to test the packages.

Peer programing is the type of approach that can bring the productivity of your team from the sum of the productivity to the multiplication of its individual or a best to the team member count exponential relationship. Peer programming has allow me to get out fast of many extreme time consuming techical show stoppers that were burning out my too little available time.